of his rheumatism. He hobbled out on the stoep and called for drinks. As they followed, Ralph noticed a lanky old man seated in the corner, muttering to himself.
He inquired of Chakata. “Is that Mr Tuys? Daphne told me about Mr Tuys.”
Chakata said, “Bad year for maize. I shan’t live long.”
Michael drove Ralph down to the cemetery. His wife had suggested: “Leave him alone for a while in the cemetery. I think he was in love with the girl.” Michael respected his wife’s delicacy. He giggled, left Ralph at the graveside, and explaining that he had some errands to do in the village, said he would be back by and by.
“You won’t be long,” said Ralph, “will you?”
“Oh no,” said Michael.
“There seem to be a lot of mosquitoes about here. Is it a fever area?”
“Oh no.” He giggled and went.
After Ralph had looked at the inscription, “Daphne du Toit, 1922–1950”, he walked up and down. He looked blankly at the gravestones and noticed one inscribed “Donald Cloete”. This name seemed familiar, but he could not remember in what way. Perhaps it was someone Daphne had talked about.
“Go’way, go’way.”
That was the bird, just behind Daphne’s grave. She had often mentioned the bird.
“It says go’way, go’way.”
“Well, what about it?” he had said to her irritably, for sometimes she had appeared to him, as in a revelation, a personified Stupidity.
She would tell him, “There’s a bird that says ‘Go’way, go’way’,” without connecting the information with any particular event; she would expect him to be interested, as if he were an ornithologist, not an author.
“Go’way, go’way,” said the bird behind Daphne’s grave.
He heard the bird at some time during each day for the next six weeks while he was completing his tour of the rural spaces. He was glad to return to the Capital, and to be free of its voice. Relaxing in the Club, it was as though the bird had never existed.
However, he went with the Governor for a round of golf:
“Go’way. Go’way …”
He booked a seat on the plane to England for the following week. He met Michael once more by chance at Williams Hotel.
“That farm,” said Michael “– someone else has made an offer. You’d better settle right away.”
“I don’t want it,” said Ralph. “I don’t want to stay here.”
They sat on the stoep drinking highballs. Beyond the mosquito netting was the bird.
“Can you hear that go-away bird?” said Ralph.
Michael listened obediently.
“No, I can’t say I can.” He giggled, and Ralph wanted to hit him.
“I hear it everywhere,” said Ralph. “I don’t like it. That’s why I’m going.”
“Good Lord. Keen on bird life, are you?”
“No, not particularly.”
“Ralph Mercer isn’t going to buy the farm,” Michael told his wife that evening.
“I thought it was settled.”
“No, he’s going home. He isn’t coming back. He says he doesn’t like the birds here.”
“I wish you could cure that giggle, Michael. What did you say he doesn’t like?”
“The birds.”
“Birds. Is he an ornithologist then?”
“No, I think he’s RC.”
“A man, darling, who studies birds.”
“Oh! Well, no, he said no, he’s not particularly interested in birds.”
“How extraordinary,” she said.
THE CURTAIN BLOWN BY THE BREEZE
It is always when a curtain at an open window flutters in the breeze that I think of that frail white curtain, a piece of fine gauze, which was drawn across the bedroom windows of Mrs Van der Merwe. I never saw the original curtains, which were so carelessly arranged as to leave a gap through which that piccanin of twelve had peeped, one night three years before, and had watched Mrs Van der Merwe suckle her child, and been caught and shot dead by Jannie, her husband. The original curtains had now been replaced by this more delicate stuff, and the husband’s sentence still had five years to run, and meanwhile Mrs Van der Merwe was changing her character.
She stopped slouching; she lost the lanky, sullen look of a smallholder’s wife; she cleared the old petrol cans out of the yard, and that was only a start; she became a tall lighthouse sending out kindly beams which some took for welcome instead of warnings against the rocks. She bought the best china, stopped keeping pound notes stuffed in a stocking, called herself Sonia instead of Sonji, and entertained.
* * *
This was a territory where you could not bathe in the gentlest stream but a germ from the water entered your kidneys and blighted your body for life; where you could not go for a walk before six in the evening without returning crazed by the sun; and in this remote part of the territory, largely occupied by poor whites amidst the overwhelming natural growth of natives, a young spinster could not keep a cat for a pet but it would be one day captured and pitifully shaved by the local white bachelors for fun; it was a place where the tall grass was dangerous from snakes and the floors dangerous from scorpions. The white people seized on the slightest word, Nature took the lightest footfall, with fanatical seriousness. The English nurses discovered that they could not sit next a man at dinner and be agreeable – perhaps asking him, so as to slice up the boredom, to tell them all the story of his life – without his taking it for a great flirtation and turning up next day after breakfast for the love affair; it was a place where there was never a breath of breeze except in the season of storms and where the curtains in the windows never moved in the breeze unless a storm was to follow.
The English nurses were often advised to put in for transfers to another district.
“It’s so much brighter in the north. Towns, life. Civilization, shops. Much cooler – you see, it’s high up there in the north. The races.”
“You would like it in the east – those orange-planters. Everything is greener, there’s a huge valley. Shooting.”
“Why did they send you nurses to this unhealthy spot? You should go to a healthy spot.”
Some of the nurses left Fort Beit. But those of us who were doing tropical diseases had to stay on, because our clinic, the largest in the Colony, was also a research centre for tropical
